This is a very important and thorough lecture Scorsese gives not only on film preservation, but on the importance of looking beyond the values of our current culture when they may be more geared towards embracing transience than lasting pieces of our humanity. I'm only half way through so far. He uses the case of Vertigo, Vertigo's near extinction before being restored and preserved, and its ultimate displacement of Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound's poll after Kane stayed number one for forty years, as an example of a work that wasn't once as highly regarded as it is now taking on new relevance directly because of its preservation and continued availability to new generations.

The lecture is long and can feel a bit like homework, a bit like sitting through a class you want to skip parts of, but I can't imagine a better teacher of cinema than Scorsese and this particular video is worth every minute.

This is a very important and thorough lecture Scorsese gives not only on film preservation, but on the importance of looking beyond the values of our current culture when they may be more geared towards embracing transience than lasting pieces of our humanity. I'm only half way through so far. He uses the case of Vertigo, Vertigo's near extinction before being restored and preserved, and its ultimate displacement of Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound's poll after Kane stayed number one for forty years, as an example of a work that wasn't once as highly regarded as it is now taking on new relevance directly because of its preservation and continued availability to new generations.

My question to you would be (and to any other person that's interested), to what extent is this possible? You know, how does one actually achieve looking outside of their current time and space?

Adorno talks about the imminent critique and this theory poses problems itself. So, with this being said, how does one look passed the culure in which they're fixated in? Does this make sense?

I think actively being your own filter to the best of your ability is probably the most you can do. Choosing the films and books and articles you read selectively based on personal impulses and inclinations, not basing the majority on...I guess I'll call it "crowd-advertising" (aggregation engines such as Reddit, etc.)

Lots of people make an active effort to not be influenced by corporate advertising, to be conscious of the obvious strings being pulled, they DVR shit and skip commercials, and on and on....

The internet, though, affects people similarly, and there's a continuous roll towards cultural homogenization right now in that most people are consuming things from similar sources, and are also generally looking at and reading the same things online regardless of culture or country. Obv good and bad, people are the same everywhere and it's great people are connecting this way now, but there's also just a general trend towards passive consumption of content I'd liken to couch potato TV addicts in the pre-internet era. It's just as bad in a different way.

The trend towards crowd-sourced content also leaves people with little context for what they're seeing. I think most of us are generally the same age, here, I think I'm few years younger than most of you, but I'm glad I grew up in a time when my attention wasn't under threat of being diverted by the internet constantly in that I was able to follow extended trajectories of film history and indulge those interests with little distraction. (Watching movies by Scorsese led me to this which led me to that and on and on). I can't imagine doing that, now, if I were 14 or whatever. Now the entry point into this stuff is so much more amorphous and convoluted.

I find this really funny, but...

...I have to imagine that that's going to be some eight year old's introduction to Jurassic Park before even seeing the movie. They'll watch the real thing some time and go "oh this is that movie from the flute video..." and not the other way around.

It's all backwards and forwards and up and down now and I think the loss of context, and also the loss of context due to the human element, just not having the time or attention to investigate things chronologically in a focused way over extended periods, is one of the greatest threats to culture as a whole. Nothing is really building on itself now except for the actual technological tools. Those are developing. It's too bad the importance of the actual content has become obscured by everyone's mad, zealous fervor for the technological tools they view it on.